Kart-ON: An Extensible Paper Programming Strategy for Affordable Early Programming Education

Programming has become a core subject in primary and middle school curricula. Yet, conventional solutions for in-class programming activities require each student to have expensive equipment, which creates an opportunity gap for low-income students. Paper programming can provide an affordable, engaging, and collaborative in-class programming experience by allowing groups of students to use inexpensive materials and share smartphones. However, current paper-programming examples are limited in terms of language expressivity and generalizability. Addressing these limitations, we developed a paper-programming flow and its variants in different abstraction levels and input/output styles. The programming environments consist of pre-defined tangible programming cards and a mobile application that runs computer vision models to recognize them. This paper describes our educational and technical development process, presents a qualitative analysis of the early user study results and shares our design considerations to help develop wide-reaching paper programming environments.